[Does work cause illness? Thoughts from the viewpoint of social research]

The question as to whether work is responsible for a person's sickness is as old as the industrial working system and it has to be raised again and again, for despite the receding importance of purely gainful employment the well-being and health status of workers and often also of their relatives are determined by work. Purely medical data will not suffice to consider this problem, since the overall social conditions must be taken into consideration. Illness or health also become manifest as social behavioural patterns and must be studied as such. It is not work that makes a person sick, but rather the social environment in which he lives and works. The article shows that the conventional medical concepts of disease are often in need of being complemented by a social dimension. This becomes particularly evident by the fact that the undoubtedly grand successes of medicine based on natural sciences yield an increasing fund of knowledge confronted by an insufficiently developed system of social orientation. In this regard the system of lay knowledge which has always been characterised by knowledge oriented on the lines of action, is growing increasingly important. Effective health prevention in public health points towards the need for an increasingly intensified cooperation between the medical profession and the lay system.